Originally published on LinkedIn on July 18, 2016
I can’t say I’m an avid Pokemon Go fanatic. I downloaded the app, I’ve spent a bit of time walking around my neighborhood and I’ve learned what it takes to progress up a few levels. True, there’s a fun game here, but there’s something more fundamental going on. Look at the graphic at the top of this article. When I see a Pokemon on my phone, it’s overlaid on top of my real world. If I look behind my phone, there is no Pokemon. When I look back at my phone’s screen- there’s a Pokemon. Something special is happening. I’m interacting with my real-world with an artificial overlay in a way that is unique to me.
For home-gamers, we’ve been watching this revolution in consumer behavior over and over again for the last 20 years. And it never gets old. We could really say it started with the Windows 95 launch – not just an unprecedented marketing success, but the moment when we should have said “computers will be in everything, everything will be a computer“.
Since the 90s, advances in data communication helped computers talk to each other. Then, computers helped people talk to each other across wide distances (even if you didn’t know who that person was). Consumers didn’t know they wanted it (because they didn’t know it was possible), but they had a need and growing appetite for instantaneous, self-service access to information of all kinds. This gave rise to Google, Facebook and Social Media. In fact, an entire industry of infrastructure was born to economically support this new availability of information called “Adtech” or advertising technology (where I’ve been lucky enough to spend the last ten years of my career).
In 1995, computers were still mostly for the office and productivity. But Windows 95 brought with it a word that consumers understood: “Start.” Start what? Start anything.
Why is Pokemon Go more than a game that has all the key characteristics to be a blockbuster title? Because just like Windows 95, this is the moment when we’ll look back and realize this was the paradigm shift. This is the moment when consumers decide that they do want their physical reality to be enhanced in their own unique and individual way. Google Glass was a good try at being a catalyst but we learned that consumers want a “when-I-want-it-on” experience not an “always-on-and-I-have-to-wear-it-too” experience.
Consumers will want this. Frankly, all you have to do is project Google maps to the next level. Not only do I want to know where I am and what’s around me but what’s around me that is relevant to me. And there is an army of dollars waiting to make that happen. If you thought Amazon has killed retail, think again. Until we actually live in the matrix, people do want to interact with their world- they just want to do it with things that interest them. Retailers are the new sovereigns of the physical world and some of them are figuring out how to use Pokemon Go to give consumers an augmented reality that they really want.
Pokemon Go is the first version of this kind of reality enhancement – it’s not just a game – it’s the first version of a value exchange between businesses in the real world and consumers that have a specific desire about how to experience their “real world”. And there’s money to be made mediating this experience: Pokemon’s creator, Niantic, is driving revenue from consumers AND retailers. Additionally, Unity Technologies, the company who makes the underlying gaming platform, just received a significant injection of funding. They will sell this solution wherever they can and have the muscle to do it.
If the media is the message and content is king, what bigger king of media is there than the physical world? Instead of taking the physical world and projecting it onto our screens, now we’re able to take what we want from our screens and project it on the physical world.
So what is that special thing that’s happening from an information technology perspective? It’s the convergence of the PC in your hand (mobile phone), internet infrastructure, GPS technology, highly-transactional, big data systems and social media to enable consumers to find information about and project experiences that they want onto their physical environment in real-time and continuously. Your world will never be the same – and your world will never be the same as someone else’s. From here on out, your world is personal.
